Drug makers in 31 foreign countries, including China, Russia, and Belarus, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties to top officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, former National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, and former National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director Dr. Douglas Lowy.
New information about the third-party royalty payments was made public on Aug. 9 by OpenTheBooks.com, the Illinois-based nonprofit government watchdog that sued NIH in federal court in 2022 after the agency refused to accommodate a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to disclose names of firms behind the royalties, patents involved, or individual payment amounts.
OpenTheBooks.com is represented in the federal FOIA litigation by Judicial Watch.
“The newly released documents reveal—for the first time—the names of companies that paid NIH scientists $325 million on 56,000 transactions in third-party royalties between September 2009 and October 2020,” OpenTheBooks.com said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times.
The payments went to the agency itself and more than 2,400 officials, researchers, and scientists employed by the NIH. Under current policy, NIH employees may receive up to $150,000 annually in outside royalty payments for their work that is commercialized by private firms; any payments above that threshold go to the NIH.
The NIH annually awards about $30 billion in federal research grants to more than 56,000 recipients.
“That taxpayer largess buys plenty of friends and enormous influence across the entire U.S. healthcare complex — the scientific, research, drug, therapeutic, and healthcare industries,” OpenTheBooks.com said in the statement.
Drs. Fauci and Collins are the most prominent recipients of the payments, with both having served in their respective government positions for many years; they also served as key White House medical policy advisers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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